If you’ve been paying attention

If you’ve been paying attention there’s been three recent blog posts about the Microsoft migration method and things to keep in mind while performing it.

One thing I’ll still like to recommend STRONGLY is that you practice. Preferably not on a paying customer on their deployed SBS 2003 box. You want to physical to virtual a SBS 2003 (the crustier the better) and then practice the migration on THAT.

20 Thoughts on “If you’ve been paying attention”

Being an SBS newbie back then, I purchased an OEM SBS2003 and, of course, didn’t know about the 90 days to purchase software assurance. So technically, licensing prevented me from being able to P2V my SBS2003 install. But I crossed my fingers and dialed up the activation hotline and was presently surprised when I was able to get to the desktop in a Hyper-V. I practiced the migration twice using MS and DIVA resources and our migration went along without a hitch.

My only issue with SBS2011 is trying to remember how many critical errors I’m supposed to ignore… grrrrrr

Yeah but the problem with those Sysinternals tools is that they are not supported. If you run into a problem you are on your own. Disk2vhd hasn’t been updated since October of last year. When working on live stuff I always prefer supported tools if possible.

Your getting things mixed up. I’m talking about the tool to use to make a virtual machine NOT what’s in the virtual machine. The tool used could care less ( at least a proper one should ) about what is in the OS. In other words the tool should only be making a faithful copy of what is on the hard drive.

I asked what tool does that the best and that can make Microsoft compatible VHD’s hopefully with support from the company that made it. Maybe Disk2vhd is the best but I wanted multiple opinions.

Support boundaries are driven by the platform. Exchange 2003 for example isn’t supported in Vmware. If you want to have support all the way throughout the virtualization process, it’s the parts that drive the support.

“Because this software is “as is,” we may not provide support services for it.”

“The software is licensed “as-is.” You bear the risk of using it. Sysinternals gives no express warranties, guarantees or conditions. You may have additional consumer rights under your local laws which this agreement cannot change. To the extent permitted under your local laws, sysinternals excludes the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.”

There are things we do in SBS that the big guys never do. For one they don’t care about dc, they build a new one and replicate. We, however do whatever it takes to restore it exactly as it was. Of course ours is also the mail server and kitchen sink.
For the needs of the intent – to do a dry run of migration it works perfectly.

The whole point of taking your SBS2003 box, making a VHD and running the migration through a virtual session to see if there are any hiccups. If you can get it working right with virtual tools then who cares if it isn’t supported?